Gay History – August 12, 1833: “Miscreant” Captain Henry Nichols Hanged for “Buggery” in London

In England until 1861, the penalty of “buggery” was reduced to “merely” life imprisonment but that change came almost thirty years too late for British Army Captain Henry Nichols who was sentenced to death and executed.

In 1833, the London Courier printed the following account:

Captain Henry Nicholas Nicholls, who was one of the unnatural gang to which the late Captain Beauclerk belonged, (and which latter gentleman put an end to his existence), was convicted on the clearest evidence at Croydon, on Saturday last, of the capital offence of Sodomy; the prisoner was perfectly calm and unmoved throughout the trial, and even when sentence of death was passed upon him. In performing the duty of passing sentence of death upon the prisoner, Mr. Justice Park told him that it would be inconsistent with that duty if he held out the slightest hope that the law would not be allowed to take its severest course. At 9 o’clock in the morning the sentence was carried into effect. The culprit, who was fifty years of age, was a fine looking man, and had served in the Peninsular war. He was connected with a highly respectable family; but, since his apprehension not a single member of it visited him.

A first-person narrative poem written* in 1833 under the name of *Lord Byron titled *Don Leon” was a signal piece of literature: the first overt literary defense of homosexuality in English.

It opens with a scene said to be inspired by Captain Nicholls:

Thou ermined judge, pull off that sable cap! What! Cans’t thou lie, and take thy morning nap? Peep thro’ the casement; see the gallows there: Thy work hangs on it; could not mercy spare? What had he done? Ask crippled Talleyrand, Ask Beckford, Courtenay, all the motley band Of priest and laymen, who have shared his guilt (If guilt it be) then slumber if thou wilt; What bonds had he of social safety broke? Found’st thou the dagger hid beneath his cloak? He stopped no lonely traveller on the road; He burst no lock, he plundered no abode; He never wrong’d the orphan of his own; He stifled not the ravish’d maiden’s groan. His secret haunts were hid from every soul, Till thou did’st send thy myrmidons to prowl, And watch the prickings of his morbid lust, To wring his neck and call thy doings just.

*NOTE: Don Leon is a 19th-century poem attributed to Lord Byron celebrating homosexual love and making a plea for tolerance. At the time of its writing, homosexuality and sodomy were capital crimes in Britain, and the nineteenth century saw many men hanged for indulging in homosexual acts. But unfortunately its narrative and notes several incidents that happened after the poet the Lord Byron’s 1824 death it obviously could not have been written by him.

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Will Kohler is one of America's best known LGBT historians, He is also a a accredited journalist and the owner of Back2Stonewall.com.
A longtime gay activist Will fought on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic with ACT-UP and continues fighting today for LGBT acceptance and full equality.
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